Do You Need Strong Technical SEO Before Starting GEO?
You need the technical basics before starting GEO, not flawless technical SEO. The basics are the things that decide whether AI systems can read your site at all. Key pages must be indexable. The search crawlers of the assistants you care about must be allowed through robots.txt and any firewall or CDN. Main content must be in the HTML rather than loaded by scripts, URLs must work, and sitemaps should be submitted to Google and Bing. Perfect speed scores, schema on every page or a large backlink profile can wait. Much GEO work, such as profiles, reviews, list placements and press coverage, happens off your site and can start at once. What GEO cannot do is stand entirely apart from search and brand-building.
What is the minimum technical checklist?
| Item | Why it matters for AI answers | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| Key pages indexable | Google's AI features can only cite pages in Google's index, and other assistants need the page in the index they use | Search Console coverage; no stray noindex tags |
| AI search crawlers allowed | Blocked crawlers mean missing from that engine's answers | robots.txt rules and CDN or firewall bot settings |
| Main text in the HTML | Most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript | View the page source, or fetch it without scripts |
| Working URLs and redirects | AI crawlers often request old or broken URLs | Crawl the site; check logs for 404 errors |
| Correct canonical tags | The version you want cited is the one indexed | Inspect key templates |
| Sitemaps in Google and Bing | Bing feeds Copilot and some other assistants | Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools |
| Reasonable response times | Slow pages can time out for crawlers | Server logs and basic speed tests |
Two of these rows have direct evidence behind them. An analysis by Vercel and MERJ, published in December 2024, found that none of the major AI crawlers it studied rendered JavaScript. It also found that about a third of ChatGPT's and Claude's page fetches hit missing pages. Broken URLs and script-only content quietly remove pages from AI answers.
What does not need to be perfect first?
- Speed and Core Web Vitals scores, beyond avoiding very slow pages.
- Structured data everywhere. It helps search engines, but assistants mostly quote visible text, and Google says no special markup is needed for its AI features.
- Large link-building campaigns. Mentions in the right places matter more for AI answers than link counts.
- Complex site architecture changes, unless key pages are orphaned or unreachable.
Which GEO work can start without site changes?
- Completing and correcting profiles on Google, Apple, Bing, Yelp and the directories in your field.
- Asking every customer for an honest review in their own words.
- Getting included, accurately, in the comparison lists and articles assistants cite.
- Correcting wrong facts about you on third-party sites.
- Tracking what assistants say about you, to find the biggest gaps.
Can GEO work as a standalone strategy without SEO and brand-building?
Not fully. AI answers depend on two things that belong to SEO and brand-building.
- Search rankings feed retrieval. Ahrefs' 2026 analysis found about 38% of AI Overview citations came from Google's top 10. For Claude, one analysis found 79.2% of citations came from Brave's top 10. Evidence for ChatGPT is mixed: Seer Interactive (early 2025) found 87% of ChatGPT search citations within Bing's top 20, while Ahrefs (July 2025, 15,000 prompts) found only about 8% overlap with either Bing's or Google's top 10. Pages that rank nowhere are rarely retrieved.
- Brand mentions shape recommendations. Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility far more strongly than backlinks did. Earning those mentions is brand-building.
So GEO is best seen as a layer on SEO and brand work, not a replacement. You can shift emphasis, for example from link building towards mentions, reviews and accuracy. But you cannot drop the foundations. How the two combine is covered in when a business should prioritize GEO over traditional SEO.
What is a sensible order of work?
- Weeks 1–2: fix the technical basics on the checklist above, starting with crawler access and script-only content.
- Weeks 1–4, in parallel: profiles, reviews and correcting wrong third-party facts.
- Weeks 3–8: clear pages for your main services or products, pricing and comparisons.
- Ongoing: list and PR outreach, question tracking by engine, and further technical work as tracking reveals problems.
Whether GEO work can hurt SEO is covered in whether GEO work hurts traditional SEO rankings.
What might an illustrative case look like?
Consider an illustrative online training company with a slow, JavaScript-heavy website and a long list of technical SEO tasks. Rather than waiting for a full rebuild, it fixes three things first. It allows OpenAI's and Perplexity's search crawlers, which its firewall was blocking. It adds server-rendered text to its course pages, which were empty without scripts. And it redirects 200 old course URLs that assistants were still requesting. At the same time, it corrects its listings on two course directories and asks recent learners for reviews. Within six weeks, Perplexity and ChatGPT begin citing its course pages. The remaining speed and architecture work continues over the following months without holding GEO back.
What do people ask about technical SEO and GEO?
Is technical SEO more important for GEO than for SEO?
Some parts matter more, especially readable HTML and crawler access, because AI crawlers are less capable than Googlebot at rendering scripts.
Can a website built entirely with JavaScript be cited?
Only if the text reaches crawlers. Server-side rendering or pre-rendering usually fixes this.
Do we need llms.txt?
Google says its search does not use it. It is optional, and fixing crawler access and HTML content matters far more.
Should small businesses hire a technical SEO first?
Often a short audit is enough to fix the basics. Profiles and reviews can start at the same time.
Published by The Kovmere Team · updated Sep 29, 2026 · More resources